Creating and reading images:towards a communication framework for Higher Education learning

This article offers theoretical underpinnings that can support an image-based communication framework for Higher Education. This framework targets students in higher education for the purposes of their productive engagement with curriculum content through visual materials and accompanying narratives. Its structure is presented in the concluding part of the article and arises from the reviewed literature throughout the article. Within this structure, blogs are suggested to serve the purpose of an image and narrative repository. The main argument in the article is that image-based communication provides a tool for externalizing students’ process of concept understanding. That understanding is seen to surface while students create, explain in writing and then discuss the created images with their peers and teacher. In that respect, the suggested framework might provide a channel for expressing students’ prior knowledge and cultural background alongside being an alternative way of communication method in Higher Education

Thinking with digital images in the post-truth era:a method in critical media literacy

This article introduces a new method to support critical media literacy, learning and research in higher education. It acts as a response to an unprecedented profusion of visual information across digital media that contributes to the contemporary post-truth era, marked by fake news and uncritical consumption of the media. Whereas much has been written about the reasons behind and the character of the post-truth, less space has been dedicated to how educators could counteract the uncritical consumption of images from the perspective of semiotics. This article adopts a unique semiotic approach to address the stated gap. It discusses in depth the meaning making of pictures, digital photographs and material objects that photographs can embody. It does so by focusing on three aspects of a pictorial sign: 1) the materiality of its representation and representational elements, 2) its object (what the sign refers to), and 3) its descriptive interpretations. These three aspects inform the Signification analysis within the proposed Production-Signification-Consumption (PSC) method, exemplified with digital photographs. Understanding and analysing images via the PSC method draws attention to how humans create, interpret, (re)use, consume, and respond to online and offline communication signs. The method can contribute to the development of critical media literacy as an engagement with postdigital semiotics, much needed in an age of global ecological and social crises, uncertainty, and fast consumption of digital content

MultiMAP:exploring multimodal artefact pedagogy in digital higher education

In spite of an established and growing body of literature in the field of “multimodality”, there are scarce examples in education studies that acknowledge and explore this approach to communication in HE pedagogy (teaching-learning). This paper reports preliminary findings of a study on multimodal artefacts pedagogy in a postgraduate online course in Education. The focus reported here is on how students perceive the pedagogical value of creating multimodal artefacts that consist of a digital pictorial image and an accompanying narrative. The results point at three pedagogical experiences: the tension within a “monomodal assessment –multimodal activity” orientation, the “outsider” status of an image-based activity in a PG Education course, and the “liminal” experience that the activity triggered as a route to a transformative learning experience. Some implications for HE pedagogical designs are briefly noted

Postdigital Living and Algorithms of Desire

This article-commentary introduces the concept of "postdigital living". It reflects on the power of the media, collectively speaking across various genres whose boundaries are ever more blurred, and shifts in general media machinery in relation to algorithms. Media (news, film, social media, advertising) hold a powerful grip over human life, influencing its various aspects such as(un)democratic decision-making ), adolescents’life decisions, and adoption of worldviews that put entire groups of people under the banner of mortal enemies. Many people are increasingly‘relying on their devices during this pandemic to inform and distract more than ever before. In our postdigital times of blurred boundaries between virtual and real, we also experience an increased blurring of boundaries between‘natural’and‘artificial’forms of life. In 2003, Steve Fuller and Bruno Latour debated whether‘a strong distinction between humans and non-humans is no longer required for research purposes. Two decades later, their debate has become‘embodied’in various artificial intelligences. Algorithmic online celebrities, such as Miquela Sousa aka Lil Miquela with over 2 million followers on Instagram, are examples of uncanny postdigital developments, targeting children and teen audiences

Designs for learning and image-based conceptual inquiry:a DBR research project

There has been a long tradition of mobilising images for purposes of supporting effective educational practice.This paper presents a design based study which aims to engage postgraduate students with reflecting on and discussing module concepts via self-selected images.The research finely tunes the nature of the pedagogical processes in the interest of creating a framework for Higher Education teaching and learning with and from images

Images of educational practice: how school websites represent digital learning

What does school life and learning look like? One way of addressing this question would be to consider the images that educational institutions employ to represent the activity of their students. In this chapter, we report the results of applying such an approach to 151 websites of English primary schools. They were randomly selected from a government database of such schools. Photographic images found on these sites were then classified into 18 base categories according to their principle content. Images of the school ‘environment’ (the building, classroom), ‘sport’ activities and ‘personality’ images of children (presenting individual or groups of children) dominated this corpus. The principle themes tended to show children variously involved in exercise, performance, visits to external sites or different forms of active inquiry. Involvement with any type of digital resources was found to be a very infrequently represented form of student activity. This low profile of digital engagements was reinforced by an audit of after-school clubs advertised on the websites which showed that less than 5 % of the clubs were technology-related. These findings are discussed in terms of a tension between the rhetoric and investment associated with technology-enhanced learning and the extent to which it is publically and visually celebrated by educational institutions

Do pictures ‘tell’ a thousand words in lectures?: how lecturers vocalise photographs in their presentations

This article explores how 145 photographs collected from 20 PowerPoint lectures in undergraduate psychology at 16 UK universities were integrated with lecturers’ speech. Little is currently known about how lecturers refer to the distinct types of photographs included in their presentations. Findings show that only 48 photographs (33%) included in presentation slides were referred to explicitly by exploring their features to make a point related to the lecture content, with only 14 of these used to invite student questioning. Most photographs (97 or 67%) represent a case of ‘unprobed representations’, that is, either ‘embedded’ in the talk as ‘illustrations’ of the speech topic or not referred to at all. A taxonomy of uses that lecturers made of the photographs in their slideshows was created through adapting a Peircean semiotic analysis of the photograph–speech interaction. The implications in terms of lecturer and student engagement with the photographic material are discussed, arguing the case for more Critical Semiotic Exploration of photographs in HE practice

A “Strong” Approach to Sustainability Literacy:Embodied Ecology and Media

This article outlines a “strong” theoretical approach to sustainability literacy, building on an earlier definition of strong and weak environmental literacy (Stables and Bishop 2001). The argument builds upon a specific semiotic approach to educational philosophy (sometimes called edusemiotics), to which these authors have been contributing. Here, we highlight how a view of learning that centers on embodied and multimodal communication invites bridging biosemiotics with critical media literacy, in pursuit of a strong, integrated sustainability literacy. The need for such a construal of literacy can be observed in recent scholarship on embodied cognition, education, media and bio/eco-semiotics. By (1) construing the environment as semiosic (Umwelt), and (2) replacing the notion of text with model, we develop a theory of literacy that understands learning as embodied/environmental in/across any mediality. As such, digital and multimedia learning are deemed to rest on environmental and embodied affordances. The notions of semiotic resources and affordances are also defined from these perspectives. We propose that a biosemiotics-informed approach to literacy, connecting both eco- and critical-media literacy, accompanies a much broader scope of meaning-making than has been the case in literacy studies so far

Being knowledge, power and profession subordinates:students' perceptions of Twitter for learning

Further conceptualisations are needed that consider students' actual engagement with and perceptions of Twitter for learning. To address this gap, an optional Twitter learning activity was created for a UK-based cohort of Year 1 Physiotherapy students. However, students did not contribute in this medium. Forty-three participating students were surveyed, and two focus groups held. These methods explored: 1) the frequency of student self-initiated use of social media, focusing on Twitter, 2) students' perceptions of Twitter, and 3) factors that would discourage or facilitate students' use of Twitter for learning. Results suggest students perceive Twitter as a platform where student knowledge and power is subordinated to leading Twitter users from relevant disciplines or professions, but also as a platform for enhancing career/business. To this end, a ‘digital information activation’ (Dig-Info-Act) pedagogy for social media is suggested: that is, a pedagogical orientation towards a critical analysis of and acting upon social media information